Bridget’s neuroscientist mother Jo has died of a brain tumour, similar to one she had defeated many years ago when Bridge was a child. Now Bridge has to wrap up Jo’s home while trying to process her own grief and guilt, and struggling to come to terms with her mother’s delusions in her final days. Not to mention all the unexplained years worth of baggage, when Jo had dragged Bridge into an obsession with an object that supposedly allowed her to explore alternate realities, parallel lives in which versions of herself lived other lives.
Except amongst Jo’s effects, Bridge actually finds the dreamworm, the same strange object her mother claimed allowed her to slip between universes. And now Bridge has to contend not just with her memories of her mother and the trauma she left behind, but with the possibility that perhaps Jo was never delusional, never wrong, and possibly isn’t even truly gone. How far would a grief stricken daughter go for one more chance with her mother?
The dreamworm doesn’t just allow Bridge to slip into another place, but also another self—another Bridge in a parallel universe, with an infinite Bridges existing in infinite parallel universes. Bridge remembers a game she played as a child with her mother, where they did just this—slipped in and out of the multiverse, but she’d written it off as a game that was part if Jo’s delusions caused by an earlier brain tumour. As Bridge reconsiders her childhood, she has to also reconsider what she thought she knew of her mother. The woman she met in her mother’s final days may not have been her mother at all—her mother may just have slipped into another universe to keep living in a healthy body, leaving a confused, scared version of herself trapped in Bridge’s reality.
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Bridge
Once Bridge figures out how the dreamworm works, she starts to explore all the realities she can, looking for her version of Jo. While she impulsively and desperately throws herself into this, her best friend Dom reads Jo’s journals and contacts people she worked with, to try and put together some of the history behind the dreamworm, and figure out how it works. They are also tasked with babysitting the other Bridges who find themselves suddenly transported into a new reality. While Dom is limitless in their empathy and support for Bridge, they are clear that this whole body-and-reality-swapping-without-mutual-consent thing is wrong. Wishing your mother were alive in order to repair your relationship with her is acceptable, but “not at this cost, stealing moments from people’s lives, borrowing their bodes without permission.”
There are consequences to Bridge’s forays into the multiverse, mysteries within mysteries that slowly unravel, and Dom, like the reader, knows that wish fulfilment fantasies never go quite right. The dreamworm—like the monkey’s paw, like the genie’s lamp, like the pet cemetery—is a powerful and possibly other worldly artefact that helps those who consume it slip between realities. It isn’t a portal in and of itself, but it does let you access the other universes in which a version of you exists. And like all powerful wish fulfilment objects, like all other worldly gifts, it comes at a cost.
It’s also Bridge’s legacy from her brilliant, troubled, determined mother. We often inherit the traumas of our parents after all, one way or another.
Unknown to Bridge, there is a woman called Amber on the hunt for anyone who switches realities and ‘infects’ those with whom they have swapped existences. Amber, a veteran soldier with her own PTSD, comes across the dreamworm after her brother in arms Chis is infected by someone swapping bodies with him, and she will not rest until she stops Bridge, once she realises that Bridge is lily pad jumping between realities: “if she lets them go, this mother and daughter, what has it all been for? … She has to save the world. They all do. War makes monsters of us all.”
Motherhood makes monsters of us all, too. Beukes doesn’t shy away from the idea of motherhood as inherently parasitic in nature: whether it is the ties of shared cells, of foetal matter left behind in a woman’s body after she’s given birth, or generational trauma, Bridge reminds us that there are always accidental, unwanted inheritances, body swaps of a whole other nature, especially between mothers and daughters. Jo becomes who she is partly in reaction to her family environment, just as much later, Bridge wonders if she “doesn’t have to be her mother’s daughter. She could be anyone, or simply herself.” Jo writes about motherhood in her diary, “…it was just me and Bridge, and I never realised how selfish I was until I had her, and she demanded everything. Everything. A small and terrible god. Love and destruction.”
This love that Bridge feels, the guilt she carries alongside the grief she has not yet processed, this is what pushes her into a storm of multiverse activity, with raging realities coming together in a thrilling crescendo that does not miss a beat. Beukes does puzzle box thrillers very well, this is nothing new to those who have read her earlier books (Broken Monsters, The Shining Girls), and within that genre, she is continuously able to explore greater depths of the human experience. Bridge is a a powerful exploration of grief, loss, love and the very human desperation for another chance.
Bridge is published by Mulholland Books.
Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.
